How these Georgia restaurants capitalize on the viral soft serve margarita

At least, it’s the first spot it was seen by Irayda Marin, the owner of Senor Taco, a family-owned restaurant in Senoia and Suwanee. It’s also where Ana Angel’s daughter discovered it when she sent it to her mom as an idea to use at their family’s restaurant, Los Bravos in Woodstock.

The soft serve margarita is more like a dessert than a cocktail. Soft serve machines combine a liquid ice cream mix with air, continuously freezing and scraping it into a smooth texture. The process increases the volume of the product and makes it creamier than traditional ice cream.

Angel said Los Bravos first tried to make its own margarita soft serve mix, but after many attempts, they decided to buy a dairy-free version. She experimented with adding various ratios of tequila, a challenge because alcohol freezes at a much lower temperature than water.

Too much tequila made watery soft serve that lost its signature texture. Angel decided to add less tequila to the actual soft serve mix and instead supplement it with a tequila shooter stuck inside.

Credit: Courtesy of Ana Angel

Credit: Courtesy of Ana Angel

The soft serve margarita combines disparate culinary items that rose to popularity in the same era. The margarita has an origin story that’s hotly debated but can generally be traced back to the late 1930s or early 1940s. Soft serve is said to have been invented by J.F. McCullough or Tom Carvel in the late 1930s.

The frozen margarita machine was actually invented in 1971 by Dallas restaurateur Mariano Martinez, who repurposed a soft serve ice cream dispenser to make the slushy-like cocktail. So the soft serve margarita is almost like a return to its early roots.

When Marin saw the soft serve margarita trending on social media, she decided to take a chance on making it herself in Senoia because she couldn’t find them anywhere else in Georgia. She set off to buy a soft serve machine without telling anyone else at the restaurant what she was up to.

“I just arrived one day with the machine,” she said.

She reached out to someone who ran a soft serve food truck and asked him to teach her how to use it.

When her brother-in-law saw the price of the machine, he was skeptical. But Marin trusted her instincts.

“I was like, ‘I know the girls are going to come out here, they’re going to come out,’” she said. “I wanted to prove that I was right.”

She posted a teaser on Facebook soon after buying the machine, and spent the weekend testing different soft serve and tequila ratios.

On Monday, March 16, the first day Senor Taco in Senoia officially started selling soft serve margaritas, she got a call from the restaurant while she was dropping her son off at school.

“They were like, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of people coming in for the soft serve margaritas,’” she said.

Credit: Courtesy of Irayda Marin

Credit: Courtesy of Irayda Marin

That day, she sold about 50, and the number crept up every day thereafter until it hit 200 on Saturday. The restaurant had crowds coming in from metro Atlanta to try their soft serve margaritas, so much so that Marin’s regular customers were confused by long wait times.

Meanwhile at Los Bravos in metro Atlanta, similar ideas were brewing. Angel’s family has owned Los Bravos locations around the metro area since 1990. Angel is now a talent manager for social media influencers, but her dad recently reached out to her for help with their Los Bravos location in Woodstock, which she said has been struggling.

Angel immediately pushed them to develop a social media presence and began searching for a trend that could bring in more crowds. When her daughter showed her the soft serve margarita, she knew it could be a hit.

On March 26, Los Bravos launched its soft serve margaritas at the Woodstock location.

“That first weekend, man, I’m talking we had like, Cinco de Mayo days in there,” she said. “Like it was slam packed.”

That weekend, they did tens of thousands of dollars in sales, she said, and business is still going strong as more people discover it through social media.

What makes food go viral?

Following trends can be a risk. This is something Marin has learned from experience — Senor Taco has tried holding trivia nights, karaoke and sip and paint events. But it’s hard to predict what will take off, and each unsuccessful investment can be disheartening.

Marin thinks the reason everyone fell in love with the soft serve margarita is pretty simple: It’s just fun.

“I feel like it’s kind of nostalgia,” she said. “The way how the women’s eyes kind of glisten and like their face brightens up, and they’re like, ‘What? Oh, bring me one!’”

But food has been going viral for decades, not just in the age of social media.

Akila McConnell, a food historian in Decatur, pointed to one of the most recognizable versions of this — the modern margherita pizza, which wasn’t actually invented until the late 1800s. The popular legend says a Neapolitan restaurateur created several varieties of pizza to present to Queen Margherita of Savoy, and her favorite was the tomato, basil and mozzarella combination. The story goes that she loved it so much he named it after her. Since its invention in Naples, the pizza margherita has spread throughout the world and remains popular.

“I think the internet can in some ways increase adaptation and increase fusion faster, but at the same time, it can also create more errors,” McConnell said.

Although social media may make it easier for cooks to learn about and adopt trends and cuisines from around the world, that doesn’t always mean they will produce successful results, McConnell said. If someone has never tasted a quality version of that cuisine, and if there’s no real thought behind the flavor and experience, then their take on it likely won’t be that enjoyable.

“There is always going to be an evolution in how things are eaten as ingredients cross borders, as methodologies as well cross borders,” she said. “I mean, it is part of the way food works. It’s this constant reinvention, constant fusion of cuisines.”

What does the soft-serve margarita mean for these restaurants?

The tricky thing about viral food is it doesn’t always stick around for long. So although these soft-serve margaritas may be popular on social media right now, it could fall out of style at any point, like the rainbow bagels of yore (2015, that is).

The life cycle of a trend can come down to something as simple as quality. If it tastes good, and it’s made with quality ingredients, it has a better chance of lasting, McConnell said. Take tomato sauce, for example; tomatoes thrived in Italy, so they caught on in Italian cuisine despite not being native to the region. Mangoes, on the other hand, don’t grow very well in the United States, McConnell said, and therefore haven’t been incorporated into U.S. food culture quite as readily.

Marin is aware that trends carry a risk of going out of style, and the crowds may stop wanting soft-serve margaritas, particularly when the weather changes. But even if that happens, she said she can just put the machine into storage and pull it out again in the summer.

Credit: Courtesy of Irayda Marin

Credit: Courtesy of Irayda Marin

Fortunately, her restaurant was successful before it implemented the soft serve margarita, and her customers have always been loyal to Senor Taco, especially the Senoia location. After just a month of selling the drink, she’s made up the cost of the machine, so if the trend runs out of steam, they still have loyal customers and consistent food offerings to keep them around.

And the virality of the soft serve margarita helped them out with business at their Suwanee location, which gets less foot traffic than in Senoia.

At the end of the day, Marin said it feels good that their restaurant in the small town of Senoia, was able to be a tastemaker for the past couple of weeks when the big trends seem to happen closer to Atlanta.

As for Los Bravos’ Woodstock location, its been doing better business ever since, Angel said, but she knows they always need to be iterating on the next trend. With the soft serve margarita, they’ll start offering new flavors like horchata and piña colada as specials, and will consider keeping the most popular options on the menu full time.

“It’s just consumerism; that’s what America is built on,” Angel said. “And social media has made it so easy for the trends to go viral.”

Find soft serve margaritas at Los Bravos’ Woodstock, Brookhaven and Decatur locations, and at Senor Taco’s Senoia and Suwanee restaurants.